forum for week of 2 October

The first argument is very similar to Descartes’ bold “I think, therefore I am” statement, which states that beyond the knowledge of our own existence, we cannot prove that anything else we perceive in any other sense exists. This first approach of complete deniability is almost the simpler route to take, but in a sense we must trust our perceptions as sources of evidence for the existence of an external world and rely upon them in order to allow ourselves to accept externality. Although the second stance is fairly passive, they realize that they need to invest a certain amount of confidence in the fact that much more often than not, our perceptions do not deceive us, and can be relied upon as a strong source of evidence about our external world.